Listen we all know NFTs were a grift and all that but it still baffles me that they got past the naming stage. "These are called non fungible tokens" yes most assets are non-fungible actually. Non-fungibility is the default. "Yeah but these are tokens" you do realise that the advantage of 'tokens' is their fungibility, yes? A US dollar is a US dollar. A chuck-e-cheese token is a chuck-e-cheese token. The fungibility is intrinsic to the function. What you've made is not something that it makes any sense to call a token. I know it's just spicy finance crimes but like. Let's put some effort into the PR. As least cryptocurrency got an accurate name. What kind of asset are you pretending to have here. "Non fungible token" pick a fucking side.
#this post made me realise i dont know what fungible means#english is my second language#but im basically fluent#but through all the nft bullshit#i never realised i didn't know the word#prob say something about the general understanding
Something is fungible when it is completely interchangeable with its own kind in a trade or exchange. For example, currency is fungible -- one US dollar can be traded with another US dollar and essentially nothing has happened. The two dollars might be physically different -- most currencies are marked with serial numbers in case they need to be tracked due to theft or counterfeiting or whatever -- but in trade this doesn't matter. The specific dollar you have has no effect on anything -- any dollar is every dollar. Electricity is another fungible asset -- once it's in the system, it makes no difference whether the electricity you're using was developed in a coal plant or a nuclear plant or a solar panel. (Electricity, unlike coins, is physically identical which means you can't even have non-fungible edge cases like collectible coins.)
Houses, or racehorses, or paintings, are non-fungible. You can trade these just like money or electricity, but one house is not equal to every house -- their values will change relative to each other, and which house or horse or painting you have matters. If you want to economically model the value of houses as assets and trade goods, you can't do so in the unit of "house" -- you have to convert it to a fungible currency, like the dollar or the megawatt-hour, first. (You can create an "average house value" and mark the value of every house as a certain percentage above or below it, but this is just currency with extra steps. Now you've invented a fungible token useful only in comparing and trading houses. Hooray.)
Animorphs fans get a +2 to knowing what "fungible" means because KA Applegate used the word wrong once in 1998 and the book was bad enough that we all eventually learned what the word meant from each other making fun of it.
